Dan Miron’s essay, Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920 explores how women’s poetry in Hebrew emerged into the literary sphere between 1920 and 1922. One of the interesting aspects of his introduction explains that women in European literatures were writing, but were mostly engaged in the pursuit of fiction. But in 1920, Rahel Blaustein, Esther Raab, Elisheva Zirkova-Bikhovsky and Yocheved Bat-Miriam were all received as writers, and Miron explains a few reasons why this was specifically the time when women’s poetic voices were heard. One was a “revolutionary social ambience [which] encouraged the literary expression of cultural elements that until then has been marginalized or silent,” and these expressions came specifically in “the Soviet Union (after the October Revolution) and Eretz Yisrael (at the height of the Third Aliyah)” (Miron, Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920, p.66). Both of these created major social change and allowed for a different kind of expression; both of these movements galvanized around liberation of the oppressed and created social avenues for women’s voices to be heard. Miron writes that these movements happened simultaneously as older models of literary greatness were weakening, which mandated a new form (or gender) of literary expression, paving the way for these great women writers (Miron, p.69). What I find most interesting about this approach is understanding, from a historical perspective, that societies had to be broken down, altered, or re-shaped in order to make way for women’s voices. It wasn’t simply that women could enter into the discourse with their poetry, but these revolutions reframed both the poets’ and the readers’ ability to see who could be a part of the canon in a different way because they changed their societies at large. Essentially, something had to be destroyed and built up in a new way to allow women’s poetry to emerge.Frustrating about Miron’s work is his refusal to attribute the lack of women’s writing to misogyny and male chauvinism. He writes, “editors would have welcomed a woman poet had one sent them work that could meet the standards of their poetics. Such texts were not submitted, whether because the women who tried to write could not conform to the norms of reigning tastes, or because an atmosphere was created in Hebrew literature which dissuaded women from even attempting to stand the test and brave the criticism” (Miron, p.70). Here, he seems to indicate that it had nothing to do with the historical times (which misogyny and can be a part of), yet the women of the times weren’t talented enough writers to pass the test. While I’m not a literary historian by any means, this seems like a gross misunderstanding of oppression (even if subtle!) of women.